Grounded for Life

The fear (and excitement) of the possibility of getting in trouble runs deep in the veins of adolescents, who spend the majority of their time testing the boundaries of right and wrong. I for one never wanted to get into trouble, but I was certainly no angel.

Lucky for me, I was the second child in my family, the “good child,” if you will. My brother paved the way for me by getting into trouble in any possible way he could. By the time I got to high school, the assistant principal knew who I was simply because of my relation to my brother. I might mention that she never saw me in her office. I was too slick for that. I learned from his mistakes. I was never sent to detention, or suspended, or arrested. Sure I skipped class and broke a few minor laws — who didn’t?

For me, the worst trouble I could get into was with my parents. My parents were actually very lax and I was never grounded. Instead they used the old Jewish guilt to punish me. When my dad caught me smoking just by giving me a kiss, the look on his face was enough to make me never become a smoker. The last thing I wanted was to disappoint my Dad.

They were slick as well. One night when I was in about 9th grade, I snuck out the back door of my house to go hang out at a boy’s house (we were just friends, I swear!) When I came home in the wee hours of the morning, the back door was locked. I thought this was strange, but obviously I had to get in. So I went to the front door, and when I walked in I was staring at my father sitting on the couch. I don’t know if he actually said, “where were you?” or if that’s what his face said. I had gotten so used to walking around my house in the dark, it definitely caught me off guard.

And still my favorite story of getting into trouble, and pardon me if I’ve told this story before, was when I was 20. By this time, I was slick enough to know how to bounce back from the unexpected. I was out with my best friends from high school and college on Thanksgiving eve at a local bar. My best friend from college had traveled from Boston to spend the holiday with me. Thanksgiving Eve of course is the biggest night of the year to go out, and I had been going out for years, but usually not to my local bar, where we could run into jack ass ex-boyfriends like my best friend’s. This ex-boyfriend had the gall to call the cops on us and got all the under age people out of the bar. I was three months shy of 21 when the cops took the three of us home to our parents at 4 in the morning, just to teach us a lesson. Obviously no charges were filed on us, but you can only imagine the look on my parents’ face when we got home. Not good. It may be interesting to note that it’s not like my parents didn’t know I drank. Hell, they found me on the morning of my 18th birthday puking my brains out, and teased me all day.

But like I said, I bounced back. On Thanksgiving Day, I whipped out the trusty Bat-Mitzvah VHS and the ‘rents went soft.

Now, 8 years after that fact, I of course still look for the approval from my parents and hate to disappoint them, but I obviously don’t worry about getting into trouble anymore. But it’s sure fun to look back at the stupid things we are did!

Like this:

lol none that i’d probably share here bc my parents certainly weren’t as lax as yours 😉 but I wonder if everyone still gets that dream of showing up to school forgetting that you had to take a major test that day? I wake up and then almost forget that not only is that over, but so is college, and so is grad school. Despite a mountain of loans, at least the majority of the fear of “getting in trouble” is gone! woo!